


Fallout: Outcasts

by TheThirdCharles



Series: Fallout: Outcasts [1]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 3, Fallout 4, Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel
Genre: Brotherhood, Brotherhood Outcasts - Freeform, Brotherhood of Steel (Fallout), Gen, Megaton, Post-Apocalypse, Raiders, The Capital Wasteland - Freeform, The Enclave - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-04
Updated: 2019-01-23
Packaged: 2019-05-18 08:49:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14849619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheThirdCharles/pseuds/TheThirdCharles
Summary: Battle-hardened soldiers of the true Brotherhood of Steel traverse the Capital Wasteland in the hopes that there is anything left for them to reclaim.Set between Fallout 3 and Fallout 4, Fallout: Outcasts seeks to explore the relationships between the factions of the volatile Capital Wasteland through the eyes of a fragile alliance. Each side remains desperate to save their civilization, but will that drive turn to determination to fight through the brutal forces that rally against them or will it only speed their societies to an all too familiar state of ruin?Any feedback is greatly appreciated. This is still a work in progress, so any thoughts, ideas, and suggestions are very much welcomed. I hope you enjoy it!





	1. The True Brotherhood

The Capital Wasteland, DC Outskirts, 2278

The wasteland’s winds were unforgiving, their force carrying the ashes of its former civilization into anyone that dare roam its landscapes. On occasion, the dust storms would be coarse enough to make it difficult to see, and at times to breathe. The air around what was once Washington DC was heavy with the scent of blood, the essence of sorrow, and the omnipresent tinge of radiation that had come to define life in 2278. The gusts on a bad day would be enough to compel most people to take shelter and wait it out, but when they brushed over Bailey and his squad, they could not so much as slow them down.  
In his armor, nothing could touch him; the cold steel around him was like another skin to him. Even in the distant memories of his youth, the prewar T-45d power armor had been as much a part of his body as much as anything he was born with. Its weight was technology’s embrace, elevating him to heights that had eluded mankind, especially now that two centuries of nuclear fallout had been slowly degrading the genes of anyone unfortunate enough to ‘survive’ without being a part of The Brotherhood of Steel. The unnatural strength it granted Bailey allowed him to hold his own against any abomination that he could expect to encounter, but it was his skill that allowed him to crush said abominations to dust. The massive hammer on his back, a Super-Sledge, was developed to push the limits of the armor’s strength, with a heavy swing capable of pulverizing skin, bone, and whatever happened to be around, armor or otherwise, it in a single hit.  
It was certainly an unwieldy weapon for any normal man, but that was hardly a description befitting one of the Brotherhood’s finest. Most could manage to lift the weapon but couldn’t hope to do much more; Bailey, on the other hand, had trained with his Super-Sledge for the better part of two decades. His skills had been forged in a hundred battles against whatever the Brotherhood had seen fit to pit him up against and his armor gave him the power to wield the hammer as if it were weightless. Even so, that was not the weapon in his arms at the moment. In the Capital Wasteland, there was scarcely a moment where it would ever be advisable to travel without some sort of protection in your hands, but the fare he expected to face in the desolate ruins outside the city proper didn’t merit the use of his hammer.  
Instead, he carried an AER9 laser rifle, once standard issue for the Brotherhood, but always growing scarcer among their numbers. To his disgust, the AER9 had once been somewhat replaced by the stockpiled conventional assault rifles that permeated the region. When the bombs fell, every cache the National Guard had placed to aid in the suppression of riots became fair game, and every aspiring warlord that emerged from their burrows a century later found the means to arm their followers and carve out two barricaded blocks of squalor to call home. It was a wastelander’s gun, not befitting a power-armored soldier that could see further than his next meal. The laser rifle was undoubtedly a finer piece of equipment- quieter, more accurate, and with a powerful beam of light that hit harder and deeper than the archaic small arms of the past. It was even roughly the same size and weight, the box-like front housing the focusing crystal notwithstanding. True, the AER9 was also designed on the cusp of the nuclear apocalypse, but then again, what hadn’t been a carry-over from the old world? Brutality had indisputably existed before, but as with so many species, the radiation had caused it to evolve, and Bailey knew no one who had acclimated as well to this evolution as Defender Moses.  
Even behind Bailey, Moses’ pride was palpable; it didn’t stem from any one event- it was a general sense of superiority that had gone unchecked for years. To be fair, this pride didn’t stem solely from Moses. He was a true believer in what the Brotherhood was, approaching whatever challenges life had thrown at him with unwavering faith in his convictions, and not without good reason. Though they wore virtually identical armor, there was no mistaking one of them for the other. Bailey stood with a slight slouch, keeping loose, but with an undercurrent of tension that could give way to a burst of adrenaline whenever the need arose. Even with the slouch, he was slightly taller than Moses, though with the latter’s impeccable posture, those they encountered tended to assume the opposite was true if they weren’t standing together.  
That was the way Moses was: perfect posture, peerless reflexes, and the stamina to march from DC to New California and back without skipping a beat; Bailey himself could attest that these were family traits from the days when he fought under the command of Moses’ father. In many regards, serving with the son was similar. The boy was just shy of half Bailey’s age, but even though he was eighteen, he had more than proven himself as a soldier, and Bailey wouldn’t trust anyone more to watch his back. Moses used a rare weapon that set him apart from the rest of his fellows, the US Army mk451 Flamethrower. It was affectionately referred to as “The Flamer” by the majority of the locals without the means of literacy to read its military designation on the side and it had been a fairly common find among scavengers and raider gangs.  
The aforementioned rarity of the weapon was not in reference to few remaining in the Capital Wasteland, but to the fact that the units were so temperamental that one was lucky to find one in proper working order. Moses had made sure that his flamer didn’t fit that description, taking what quiet moments they could find on patrol to meticulously repair any wear that might have occurred. Granted, he would need to give the weapon a level of attention typically reserved for newborns for it to function, but his absolute mastery over the fire it unleashed made any war cries his foes might give quickly turn into screams of terror and shortly thereafter into a cacophony of a death knell trying in desperation to overpower the crackling of the flesh around the throat that formed it. In the end, the screams never won, and that was as gratifying for Moses as the day he earned his armor. At his hip, to Bailey’s disapproval, sat a submachine gun for the moments where a situation called for a degree of precision over that of a scorched earth. Though it was a firearm with its complexity eclipsed by Bailey’s laser rifle, it was an undeniably effective weapon and was accurate enough to fulfill the needs of pinpoint accuracy that a jet of blazing chemicals could simply not meet.  
Where Moses reveled in battle and Bailey could snap into a combat mindset in an instant, Walt contemplated how someone like himself had joined the company of soldiers as battle-hardened as they were aloof. He then reflected that no one in his situation, his brain the only remnant of the body he was born with, encased in an automated body keeping pace, could truly claim to have chosen or even predicted this turn of events in the first place. In a previous life, he had been a man of influence, a magnate, and one of the most prolific dreamers of his time, but as his physical body neared its failure from age and the maladies that come with it, he had envisioned a way to live to see what beauty the future might hold. He spared no expense to freeze himself until medicine had progressed to the point it could restore his body and allow him to live life anew. Instead, a string of increasingly unlikely and humiliating events brought his brain into the polymer shell he had become so familiar with. Though he had no eyes, his visual sensors vividly displayed a three-hundred-sixty-degree view around him, and while this was initially a wonder, the view around him was almost always partly composed of the two power-armored children in front of him. Bailey had hit forty recently, which was uncommon for someone born into this world and Moses was a handful at eighteen, with a lust for violence that would most likely mean he wouldn’t even get as far as his commanding officer. Walt, however, was a brain aged nearly 300 years in a construct aged a hair over 200, and with many of the other holdouts of the old world that still lingered, few truly kept their sentience and fewer made for good conversation.  
He knew he shouldn’t be complaining. He was a mechanized conscript in military unit he chose not to recognize, and the pair he served with were hardly the kind of people he’d generally choose to associate with, but he’d become as used to them as he could hope for. When the Brotherhood’s reconnaissance had discovered his brain frozen in its dome, fast asleep in biogel. In the entirety of the RobCo facility’s cryo-chamber, his had been the only brain they found that hadn’t been trimmed to prepare it for a life of subservience. Lucky for him, he had been allowed to avoid the lobotomy that had become synonymous with becoming the catalyst of a Robo-Brain unit and would be allowed to keep what free will was deemed necessary for this little experiment. Walt would live as W4-Lt from that point on, but that was a fairly nominal price to pay for the use of his faculties and a new body. He could quip, dream, plan, and act in any way he saw fit so long as it furthered the mission and didn’t contradict a direct order.  
The decision to spare his higher thought processes was presented as a mercy Walt should be undyingly grateful for, but in reality, for all their prattling about their technological prowess, the Brotherhood, as they insisted on being called, didn’t know how to induct new brains into the interface domes and realized they had few enough units to risk making the sensitive trimmings required to keep him aware enough to function. No one had ever stated this out loud, but by time the second reassignment had failed and some of the more overzealous members of the organization had tried to break him into subservience like a horse, that became fairly clear. Even their technicians had to understand that having a human mind in a versatile armored support platform was more useful if he could still think laterally and didn’t just tread along awaiting orders and filling his brain dome with the proverbial drooling of a simpleton.  
Either way, it’s not like he had entirely free reign. There was still the inhibitor chip present in every cyborg and automaton that had survived since the war that ensured he didn’t vaporize Bailey and Moses while they slept, but at this point, he didn’t even want to. They weren’t warm, but they had been fine company, all things considered. They saw him as more of a teammate than a tool and he was grateful that Bailey had yet to use the override code his superiors had provided them with. The previous squads had been terrible in that and many other regards; they had sometimes used it with every order, whether the order had been tactically sound or not, but his current setup worked. Part of him liked his second swing at life, and there was much to like about his new body in particular. His armor plating gave him even more survivability than his power-armored fellows, along with the slow but tireless treads that propelled it, with Moses’ modifications allowing for almost twice the maximum speed of the typical Robo-Brain. His arms were metal hoses, which ended in claws capable of laser blasts, though his favorite offensive capability was the concussion blast situated right below his main visual sensor. He didn’t enjoy violence, but understood it was a non-negotiable expectation of him in this current state; the concussion blast gave him the ability to disorient and incapacitate a human or anything close enough to one into a state of unconsciousness, to make them flounder harmlessly to the floor like a ragdoll, or anything in-between. Granted, it was rare that he had the occasion to fight without the need for lethal force, but it was something small that made smile in his mind’s eye and hope that his opponent would stay down.  
Their squad’s outings were largely based around patrolling to find technology and bring it back to their base at the salvaged pre-war military installation Fort Independence, as per the Brotherhood’s overall mission; the men and women fighting under the banner of the Brotherhood of Steel had sworn to protect the new world from the implements of war that had reduced the old world to perdition. They would recover technology to keep it out of the hands of those they viewed as irresponsible upstarts, archiving it to understand the legacy of the civilization that had once achieved such heights. True Brothers and Sisters didn’t yearn for power in the social sense. They were the guardians of power armor, energy weapons, and other such developments that humanity at large had been unable to control responsibly- that’s why their soldiers were styled “Defender” and their officers “Protector”, and every member would die before they allowed for the proliferation of these devices to the degenerates lurking in the ashes and waiting for the chance to engulf the world in nuclear fire once again. It was rare that the spread of that technology was stymied without bloodshed.  
Even 200 years later, much of what they sought was as of yet unclaimed, waiting to be found in government caches and in the facilities that had been abandoned when the American people fled their jobs to duck and cover, but there was a reason these were still untapped. No one had found them yet, and while the Brotherhood had amassed a fair record of maps and myths about some of their locations, they were more often made to contend with those that had stumbled upon them and had used them to seize power. While these could be dangerous, the raiders getting by on improvised weapons and the various small arms littered around the surface were the much more common strain. Most didn’t have large enough guns or strong enough nerve to pose much of a threat, but even the most adamantine power armor in existence would break under enough sustained fire. Some raiders even found heavier arms, like grenade and rocket launchers that could level the playing field in a single lucky hit. It was a risk Bailey had made sure the squad wouldn’t take lightly, having seen many Brothers and Sisters cut to ribbons by a handful of enemies they had held beneath their notice. This was always present in his mind, becoming especially clear as he heard gunfire coming from the city limits.  
For now, they were taking a road parallel to the former metropolis’ edge, but if there were threats in the buildings, the squad would be left entirely exposed before they could hope to find cover and mount a counterattack. Bailey motioned for Moses and Walt to follow him, the two soldiers darting for the cover of the city’s rubble. While their power armor slowed them, it was a surprisingly mild imposition considering its size. It was heavier than the crude metal plate-mail some raiders had scrounged together, but the joints were intuitive to the user’s motion and the back and legs of each suit could very nearly bear the weight of a second one, should an ally be in need of rescue. From here, the problem was less one of being overburdened, but more one around the difficulties of a body with the weight and momentum of a mutated bear trying to stop on a dime. Anything caught in their path would be shattered, but battle warrants precise movement, particularly when diving into the fray swinging a hammer about. Yes, his blows were devastating, but one bad crash and he’d be immobilized long enough for a skilled opponent to put a shotgun between the plates of his armor and take an arm off. Gunny, the master at arms back at the citadel, had made that very clear to him during training and it was a lesson Bailey had taken to heart.  
Bailey slid into cover behind the remaining wall of a collapsed building, peeking out from cover to check the street ahead as Moses followed behind him. There was the usual wreckage- cars with their bodies largely consumed by corrosion and their fusion-powered batteries stewing like small, nuclear powder kegs, brittle, brown grass sprouting from between the asphalt so distressed it more resembled a mosaic than a road, bones of those that fell over the past two hundred years picked clean by the local fauna as much as by time, broken glass glinting like centuries old tears wept into the street never to dry. All of it reeked of misery, but yet the gunshots indicated at least the fleeting presence of life. That’s when he saw her.  
She was on the ground; blood was flooding the cracks of the street beneath her, dyeing her beige jacket, light jeans, and dusty white sneakers a deep crimson. At first it appeared that she may have been holding up a hand to plead for someone to help, but upon more than a glance, it became clear that the protruding objects were not her limbs, though they were no less part of her body now. Walt arrived behind them, unable to sprint with his treads, but steady as ever. Bailey nodded to the others to keep on alert, prompting Moses to activate the ignition of his Flamer. A budding flame appeared in front of the tube, a hint of the devastation it could unleash. The squad ran to cover behind the wall of a bombed-out café closer to the gunfire and closer to the body, allowing them a better look at the circumstances behind the woman’s death.  
The tallest blade belonged to a machete, standing upright in the home it had made in her belly. Besides that, there were another three wounds, though they had been harder to identify at first. A wooden peg jutted from one of her calves, sunk so deep that one had to see the blade peek out from the other side of her leg to realize that this was the knife that had hamstrung her and made the subsequent blows all too easy to land. Another knife sprouted from her ribs, though more shallowly than the others, with the killer having taken a far greater source of pleasure from the boot knife in her throat. Said throat was reduced to tatters as the cold steel had been twisted to ensure a death as certain as it was sanguine. Curiously, her eyes still looked to Bailey, forever frozen in pain and fear, the blades impaling her seemingly extending a hand to beg for help from anyone passing by. He’d seen enough death that such a sight was no longer the subject of nightmares, more akin to a fact of life like the fallen husk of a tree or one of the Nuka Cola machines lingering around the Capital Wasteland from before the war. What did concern him, however, was the torn ammo belt discarded behind her, a pair of discarded shotgun shells close to it providing a trail to the killer in addition to footprints that had tracked in the woman’s blood. The soles of the shoes were far from intact, with the bloodied soles giving way to the prints of exposed toes on one foot and an exposed heel on the other. All of this painted a picture of the murderer’s desperate circumstances, the fact they now likely had a shotgun, and that the wanderer they ambushed had not been alone. If she had been, why stop without looting the body completely unless there was more prey to bring down?  
From their new position, another pair of bodies was visible, closer to the noise of battle. Of the two, one was the mutilated body of a man with his arm blown off by a shotgun blast and his head caved in as if by execution via a sledgehammer. His clothing was made of burlap, but it had a similar settler look to the woman they had passed, and had no resemblance to the third body, which was still twitching when they arrived. The third had unmistakably been a warrior, covered in spiked strips of leather that had been fashioned into crude armor over third-degree burns received well before his death. His bloodied hand was held to his neck in an effort to stop the bleeding of a small caliber bullet wound that had nonetheless been enough to fatally hit an artery. This body provided a quick answer as to who had perpetrated the battle: raiders, just as he had expected. The squad moved forward, well aware that a conflict from blocks away was far from their strong suit, with only Bailey’s AER9 rifle and Walt’s laser blasts favoring mid-range and Moses insisting on two weapons that reigned supreme in close combat and little else. They’d need to advance before they could join the battle in earnest and by then, what would be left for them to save?  
Moving up to the next block, the squad could see the tail end of the struggle. A trio of wastelanders mounted a desperate defense, but little did they know their side had already been overrun by the raiders’ savage onslaught. The raiders, in their spiked leathers, all had the same level of burns that their fallen cohort had displayed, and as if forged into something fiercer in the flames, seemed to scarcely feel pain. The first waster’s revolver fired but missed its target as the waster’s eyes widened in time to see a raider’s fist slam into his head. The fist had been covered in a makeshift knuckleduster sporting jagged nuts and bolts, causing several punctures and taking him out of the fight. The waster had hardly hit the ground before the raider was on him, bringing his left fist, coated in a matching gauntlet, into the other side of his head. The raider kept pummeling until the waster’s head was reduced to a puddle of bloody chunks.  
The second waster tried to swing a tire iron to keep two more raiders at bay. The first raider laughed maniacally, holding a sledgehammer with a bolt-action rifle slung over his back, the strap straining against his bulging muscles. His friend, a female raider wielding a board riddled with rusted nails jutting from either end, joined him in mocking the waster’s futile defense. After an errant swing of the tire iron, the waster was caught through the wrist by the nail board, prompting a scream of pain. The muscle-bound raider slams his sledgehammer into his victim’s ribs, shattering them as the waster howls in anguish. He winds up, preparing the killing stroke when a bullet from an automatic pistol pierces his forearm just above his elbow. The force of the impact knocked his swing off balance. As he lowered his arm, the bullet wound inflicted moments ago became virtually indistinguishable from the years of track marks dotting the area already. He turned, more in a haze of numbness and confusion to see the final waster, more ferocious than the rest, fire another shot into his chest. The shock sent him back, but as before, the cocktail in his bloodstream reduced the pain he felt into a momentary pinch.  
Another Raider broke from the shadows, his chest and thighs covered in leather padding with raised strips ending in wooden grips. A serrated machete, rusted from the blood of countless victims, was raised above his head, the frayed leather straps connected to its handle firmly wrapped around a hand of cracked, burned flesh. With his opposite hand, the raider pulled on one of the wooden grips, revealing a kitchen knife and throwing it at the settler with the automatic. To the raider’s shock, this waster was faster than the others. Ducking the knife, the waster squinted at the raider charging at him and fired a shot into his gut. The raider coughed up blood, but the momentum of his charge was too great to be broken by a single shot. The raider drew another kitchen knife from the holster on his chest as a distraction for a machete thrust to bring the waster to the ground. Anticipating the raider’s gambit, the waster ran forward, in a move his attacker hadn’t expected. Before the machete could reach his throat, the waster seized the raider’s wrist while leveling the pistol in his other hand at his attacker’s head. The man fired his pistol, leaving the raider with an eye socket erupting in blood to match the stream flowing through his gritted teeth.  
As the raider’s body fell, a flurry of buckshot tore into both combatants. Sneering with pain, shot-shell dotting his upper chest, the waster aimed at the assailant, a scrawny, filthy runt aged no more than twenty with what could safely be assumed was the female settler’s shotgun. The shotgun in question was as dusty as could be expected from a wastelander’s weapon, the stock clumsily sawed into a pistol grip before being wrapped in tape; it was an ugly thing, but it had inarguably gotten the job done. As he ejected both shells, a look of terror flashed across the runt’s face as he saw the settler lining up a shot to take his eye out as well. The shot had looked like a clean one, but it was nonetheless foiled when the bladed raider’s corpse, its back shredded from the blast, collapsed onto the waster. The bullet briskly grazed the burnt runt’s hair and the look of dread turned into a crooked grin. As the waster fell, his pistol’s slide slammed back and stayed there, its last shot fired.  
By then, the raider with the spiked gloves had finished with the first settler’s body, his arms soaked up to the elbows in blood and the pistol tucked into the front of his belt. The female raider similarly wrenched her nail board from the second waster’s heart, prying it from splintered ribs. She clapped the sledgehammer raider on the back, snapping him out of his daze. He joined her, all the while mystified at the blood pouring from his chest wound with such detachment that it may as well have been liquid gold from a fountain. The trio calmly stalked up to their prey with the knuckled raider stepping to the fore and kicking the survivor. Snarling, the waster summoned his courage as a nail board slammed through his hand. His empty pistol bounced away as a set of jagged holes took its place. The runt joined in the savagery, boisterously nudging the reloaded shotgun under the waster’s chin. The rusted barrels dug into the waster’s throat, with the mouth above it twisted in a bitter, helpless rage. It would have been the end of the waster had it not been for a heavy clanking and a jet of flame approaching from behind the lot of them.  
The raider that stepped forward was a breed apart from his underlings, his face concealed by a welder’s mask and his body adorned in primitive, rusted metal plate mail as mismatched as it was heavy. Small, twisted spires sprouted haphazardly from its every surface, ranging from nails to railroad spikes and even torn, jagged bits of rebar. It was certainly no power armor, but it was the best that savages could forge, more than enough to turn every blow that a common waster might manage to deal. On his back was the similarly rusted pack of a mk451 flamer, the same as Moses’ in model, but the disparity in condition was so great that the Defender couldn’t help but scoff under his breath upon seeing it. Where Moses’ flamer was spotless, the raider chief’s was rusted, the nozzle blackened with use, the tubes crudely bandaged with duct tape and insulation, and the gauges on the pack either fogged or cracked beyond recognition. The chief let loose a short jet of flame above his head to get the attention of his men, who immediately stopped what they were doing to briefly bow before each moved to one of the waster’s limbs.  
They picked him up, stretching his limbs as far as they would go, with the pellets of the shot-shell causing a great deal of agony. The waster only permitted himself a grunt in defiance, refusing to scream as the raider chief filled the air above him with an almost ritualistic panache. The raiders’ burns now made sense to Bailey as they held their victim for their tribe’s sacrifice as much as for their pleasure. He didn’t claim to understand these barbaric, lesser peoples that dotted the Capital Wasteland, but the details of their practice hardly mattered now; the squad had reached a viable charge distance, stacking up behind the last standing wall of a building that was otherwise rubble. Bailey and Moses peeked out from cover to see if anything at all had survived the attack.  
“Is there anything left to save?” asked Bailey, his voice bitter as he believed he knew the answer.”  
“Doesn't look it,” replied Moses, a bit disappointed in the battle drawing to a close before he got the chance to join the fray.  
The chief hadn’t chosen to make the waster’s death a merciful one, or even as merciful as one could expect from the business end of a flamer. The chief’s boots, weighed down with sheet metal vaguely welded into a functional tip, kicked the waster, each hit sending shivers of pain into the survivor. Still, the waster refused to scream, sneering in hatred at his tormentors. Half revenge and half sadism, the sledgehammer raider tore the waster’s satchel off in a single pull, his good arm rippling with muscle. Upon looking inside, he didn’t find much of anything to suit him and tossed the bag to the ground. This would prove a fatal mistake.  
As the bag bounced against the gritty remnants of the sidewalk, a device went flying out- a handheld device cased in blackened military metal with a bright interface screen, a light as green and lively as the nuclear residue that had pooled in the worst hit corners of the wasteland. It was even brighter than the fire on the nozzle of the chief’s weapon, but the raiders paid little mind to it. The device wouldn’t scream no matter how much they tortured it, but the waster on the other hand... The gauntleted raider took the rusted, bloody knuckles of around his hand and dug them into the shot-shell wounds on the waster’s shoulder. It finally proved to be too much, as on the verge of tears from the agony, the survivor at long last loosed a heart-wrenching scream.  
“Still going after all that! We have to.” Bailey readied his rifle, a sense of purpose finally present in the resilience of the scene. He took aim, getting the chief in his sights. “Moses, first target is the flamer?”  
“The shotgun,” corrected Moses as he readied himself to close the gap on the raiders.  
“Done.”  
With that, a beam of red energy sprang forth from Bailey’s AER9. In a split second, the raider that grasped one of the survivor’s legs in one hand and the shotgun in the other shuddered as a slash of brilliant red light pierced though the profile of his head. In disbelief, the raiders abruptly dropped the waster and scrambled for their weapons as their chief bellowed the last command he was like to give.  
“Kill the steel brothers!”  
The words had scarcely left his cracked lips as a trio of laser blasts bored into his chest. His armor dampened the bolts to an extent, but two still burned themselves an inch or two into his skin underneath. The third was even more devastating, striking between the plates to open a hole in the side of his abdomen. The chief fell back, grasping his wound incredulously before struggling to his feet. Before Bailey can finish him, the knuckled raider unloaded the remaining two bullets of the revolver, with one shot hitting the steel brother in the head. In truth, it had been a lucky shot, but this was immediately hampered by the Protector’s power armor. The small-caliber bullet bounced off as harmlessly as if it had been a golf ball and with that, the raider’s heart sunk like a rock, the revolver still clicking in his hand. As Bailey’s head turned towards him in bemusement, a pulse of air and sound blindsided the raider, striking his head in waves, each blow pounding against sections of his brain he’d never felt before. The raider doubled over in the nastiest concussion he’d ever been witness to. As he writhed, he could only watch as a Robo-Brain rolled closer to his helpless form. For a moment, he thought that the pre-war shell was going to pulp his skull under its treads, but was shocked to find that it stopped, turning away in mercy.  
“Stay down, boy,” came Walt’s fatherly voice from the speakers below his brain case. “It's for your own good.”  
Moses gave a hearty laugh at this. “So sentimental, this one.” He showed no such restraint as the pair of raiders with the sledgehammer and nail board charged. It seemed that they hadn’t seen the weapon Moses was holding until it was far too late. A roaring stream of flame swallowed the female raider in an instant; her nail board was reduced to cinders a split second before her body was consumed. The burns that had scarred her before grew, ensnaring her skin until it was charred black beyond recognition. The sledgehammer raider fared better; having been further back, he dove out of the way in time to save his life, though not without a grim sacrifice- the right side of his body ignited. the pain would’ve been excruciating if only he could have felt it. Instead, his skin crisped, his entire right side virtually flayed by the flames. Still, he thought not of the pain he would have felt but that which he hoped to cause.  
Rising and sprinting to Bailey, the raider wound up for a swing, putting all of the muscle left to him into a single brutal blow. As strong as the strike appeared, it was as predictable as attacks came. Bailey stoically thrust up an arm to block and the wood of the sledgehammer’s haft shattered harmlessly against the immovable weight of his gauntlet. The hammer’s head cracked off, falling well behind them with an unceremonious thud. Even then, the impact was all but muted by the stock of Bailey’s rifle crashing into the scarred man’s throat. The raider was struggling to process the gunshot wounds and burns, let alone the collapsed windpipe, when all of that became trivial by comparison. When his body wanted to fall, a powerful metal arm reached out, locking into place around the back of his neck and pulling him in. As a shotgun blast hit his back, he could feel his body split halfway down his back. Gravity sent his bottom half flopping to the ground, joined moments later by the top half that Bailey released.  
The knuckled raider fought to keep the shotgun leveled for his second shot. Bailey’s living shield was discarded and shredded beyond use besides, but the Brotherhood warrior didn’t seem worried. As he wondered if the his last shell would have any chance of saving him, the raider felt a brief, sharp warmth in his chest followed by an immediate sense of cold as his life slipped away. At the end of a tube-like arm, the center of Walt’s claw smoked, his laser beam finishing the job that his concussion blast had begun. As the last of his underlings dropped dead, the raider chief rose on the squad’s left with his flamer at the ready and the entirety of the squad in his sights. Moses hitched his flamer onto his back, casually bringing out his submachine gun, which the chief thought odd. If the steel brother had tried to attack, it was entirely possible the two factions would wipe each other out. Similarly, the others barely bothered to turn to him. Even so, in that moment, he was wholly consumed with the fury to avenge his band of burned killers and pulled the trigger.  
The flame that dribbled from the nozzle sputtered for half a foot before shutting off abruptly. In a split second, the chief collapsed into panic as he tried hitting the tank and checking the hose to try and fix the problem, but by then his time was up. His gaze slunk to his foes in time to see all three of his enemies angling their weapons at him in a firing line. The chief has no time to cry out before Bailey’s AER9, Moses’ submachine gun, and Walt’s laser claws reduced him to a smoldering husk of a corpse. Turning their attention to more pressing matters, the triumphant Brothers surveyed the scene of the battle. The raiders had joined the ruins around them, motionless save for any wind that might blow through the scant patches of hair that hadn’t been burned away. Bailey motioned to Moses, with the younger man nodding to see what they had saved.  
The Waster held a tenuous grip on consciousness, but at the least surmised that the raiders had been slain. He propped himself up on his elbows, grateful to those that had saved him but at a loss for who it might have been. His vision blurred as the world seemed to spin around him, though he could make out the vague shape of power armor walking towards him. It was an oddly uplifting feeling he never thought he’d know. The Brotherhood happened by; the finest heroes in all of the Capital Wasteland had stumbled upon him in his hour of need and might even be able to help. It was a comforting couple of seconds that ran until he saw the specifics of the soldier’s armor. It wasn’t the blued steel of The Brotherhood that he had come to know, with their emblem painted as clear and bright as the skies in the stories from before the bombs fell. There was a certain mercy in the manner of the Brotherhood he had come to know, especially since they’d taken on a leading role in organizing the Capital Wasteland; their unmatched martial prowess and free distribution of the only pure water one could find this side of the surface had made them the de-facto rulers of the region. However, even with that amount of unchallenged power, the guidance of their leader, Elder Lyons, had created an atmosphere as peaceful and democratic as life had been in centuries.  
The hulking figure stepping towards him with a flamer on his back wore the same model of armor as The Brotherhood, that much was beyond dispute, but instead of the blued steel, his was jet black with streaks of scarlet giving it the permanent impression, intentional or otherwise, that it was stained in blood. In fact, it took the waster a moment to even discern that there was a divide between the vibrant scarlet of the paint and the mundane, dried blood of whoever had the misfortune of getting in their way. His steps tracked the blood of the raiders, the ones who had slaughtered the waster’s team but had been seemingly been almost beneath the notice of the hardened soldiers with years of dedicated training. The waster braced, attempting to crawl away, when to his surprise, the power-armored figure walked past him without so much as a glance of acknowledgement. Instead, Moses picked up the device that had fallen out of the satchel, handling it tenderly, viewing it from every side to be certain it’s intact.  
“Confirm survival, Moses. Walt, start scanning,” called Bailey, almost clinically. He calmly reloaded his laser rifle, glancing at the bodies and sizing them up for anything of value. A light on the front of Walt’s forward armor plating glowed a pale green and expanded to echo out. A nearly imperceptible ringing noise reverberated out from the metal ring around it, but the squad hardly showed an interest in the scene of the battle until Moses held up the recovered device.  
“Holy shit, we've got a Vault-Tec geomapper.”  
“Are you serious? On these hicks?” said Bailey, echoing the observation.  
Between the armor, the combat ability, the reverence of technology, and the apparent disregard for the wholesale slaughter of his people moments ago, the waster had finally realized whom he was dealing with. They might have been Brotherhood once, but there’s no way they were currently under the command of Elder Lyons: the key figure in saving the wasteland from the mutants a decade ago and from the onslaught of the Enclave in the past year. The Enclave had been the bloodthirsty remnants of the Pre-War government and the greatest existential threat that his people have ever encountered. They were heirs to resources the like of which his people couldn’t have imagined and boasted a war machine that would’ve scorched the earth clean if not for the Elder and his soldiers. The Brotherhood would’ve charged in to rescue his team immediately and any holdouts of the Enclave would’ve blown his head off the second they saw that he continued to breathe. In a panicked, disbelieving tone, hoping against hope that they might listen, the waster forced himself to speak.  
“O-o-outcasts... Y-you're Outcasts!!” He stumbled out, every breath weighing on his broken ribs.  
“Huh. They managed to set the coordinates to somewhere in DC. I figured even they knew not to enter the city,” observed Moses upon further inspection of the geomapper. The waster felt strangely emboldened by the gall with which they dismissed his gasp of life. On top of that, the one had begun tampering with a piece of equipment that his team had died to protect.  
“H-hey! That's mine, damn it!” He was past the point of caring about the aggression in his voice. What would they do, kill me? More likely than not, I’m gonna die anyway.  
“Still kicking too, eh?” scoffed Bailey, with a cold, dry tone that may have been amusement.  
“Leave him. The geomapper's already enough of a find for the next week.” Bailey joined Moses, walking past the waster as well and was handed the device to get a look for himself.  
“Must you always be so blunt? He’s the only life sign left and the kid's probably on his way out as it is. The least you could do is give him a bit of comfort,” came the uncannily soothing tone of the Robo-Brain following them. The waster had only encountered a few in all of his life, all of them briefly and yet every single one of them with the same tone of voice; they all sounded like a sultry pin-up girl from before the war, no matter who the brains that drove them had once belonged to. The markedly different voice granted this one an air of dignity that was unique among his kind and an impression of compassion that was unique among the company he kept.  
“Feel free to rock him to his eternal slumber in your hosey-arms of death, Walt,” said Moses “but I'm not touching him. Who knows what I'd catch?”  
“Go jump off a building,” shot back the Robo-Brain.  
“At least I can jump.”  
That one would never listen thought the waster. The Robo-Brain’s request went entirely unheeded and he was a cyborg besides. That left the one with the laser rifle. He’d been giving orders and hadn’t been outright cruel, but only by virtue of being completely disinterested in what I’ve been saying. Still, he’s only a few feet away and he might be my only chance. Crawling through ten feet of broken street, the waster managed to reach who he hoped was the leader. In a burst of energy that took all the willpower he had left, he grabbed the Outcast’s ankle, looking up through strained eyes. As he was touched, the Outcast turned, reflexively bringing about his rifle, though he didn’t point it at the badly wounded waster. That’s a start at least.  
“S-stop! Listen to me!”  
He half expected the Outcast to kick him away, or even to stomp on his head to shut him up, but he had gambled that the rumors coming in from scavengers and Lyon’s Brotherhood men hadn’t been true. For the other soldier, who knew, but hopefully this wasn’t the case for the one in charge. The Outcast’s helmet blocked any view that the waster might have had of his face, but from the way he looked down on the waster’s battered body, the sense of contempt was plain as day. All the same, he had stooped down to speak to him and for that, the waster was thankful.  
“Alright, local. We'll talk, but I'll be asking you the questions,” came a curt voice through the helmet’s speakers. It was clearly a man’s but even though the distortion had been minimal, it had amplified each sentiment into an intimidating voice dripping with contempt. “Where did you have these locations set to in the city? And there's something about a rendezvous point not far from here. Talk.”  
The waster hadn’t thought that far ahead and now thoughts of the Outcasts subduing the others by any means necessary gave him a sense of dread. Yes, the other team was undoubtedly formidable, but he had his doubts that they could hold their own in an outright firefight with the squad before him.  
“I-I have your attention...” he started, trying to buy time to choose his next words carefully. “And that's great... Now I need your word that y-you won't just blindly attack whatever's there.”  
“The nerve of some people... You don't get to make demands of Protector Bailey,” grumbled the younger Outcast, judging by their voices. This one radiated aggression, but from that tone, he at the very least held to the chain of command. Though every fiber of the waster’s being roared not to, he can’t contain a laugh.  
“Protector? You're with the Outcasts.” Though he knew this could easily turn bad for him, the waster was acutely aware that this had been a long shot from the start and upon watching his crew die one by one, he had all but exhausted his patience. “Brotherhood f-finally got around to protecting the people around here and you and your friends up and desert with a third of their equipment... Now I'm part of a plan that we can all benefit from, but before we continue, I need your w-word of honor you won't trash everyone and everything that's there. T-that’s my one demand.”  
The leader’s entire demeanor darkened at this, any trace of even mocking joviality evaporated in an instant. He stared into the waster’s eyes; the injured settler had guts to confront a man in power armor, and an especially deadly one at that, which Bailey could almost respect, but he had crossed a line there. The tan of his skin had suddenly grown pale, though if this was due to blood loss or terror, no one could say. His dark brown eyes certainly gave credence to the latter theory, but considering he’d had the daring to be so impressively wrong, Bailey would at least enlighten him before taking his mapper and leaving the ungrateful son of a bitch to die.  
“I have never broken an oath, local. We aren't the traitors here and you're in no position to put that on me. The Brotherhood's mission is to safeguard technology, not to take a bullet for the savages that would misuse it. The 'Outcasts' are the only ones that managed to keep that straight.” The fear was still there, but so was the waster’s resolve. Whatever they’d come here for was important enough to risk entering DC over, and it might be an unwitting confession that his like were trying to hijack equipment centuries beyond their understanding. This patrol had been a dull route, with much of the well-trodden city outskirts picked clean already. Maybe this was a lead that could help his Brothers and Sisters back at Fort Independence, and even if it didn’t, it was a better lead than they’d found in the past week or two. “But why not? I swear. Out with it.”  
The waster paused, weighing his options once more in his head. He turned himself over and relined, propping himself up on his elbows before taking a deep breath and responding.  
“My name's Luis. We were from Megaton. The city's in danger.”  
“From what? Tetanus?”  
“Moses,” scolded Bailey in an even tone.  
“Fine.” With that, the younger Outcast took a few steps away in a reluctant effort to keep things as civil as they could get. Bailey gave a slight, impatient nod to Lewis who looks into the soulless, blackened eye-slit of Bailey’s helmet, which was bordered by an ill-boding paint job of bloody scarlet and a black the hue of death itself. Luis didn’t like the situation any more than the Outcasts did, but his half of the Megaton expedition had died before the mission had even began in earnest. The formidable opportunists in front of him might be the only chance at backup they could hope for. They’d also promised not to open fire immediately, and that was the best Luis felt he could hope for.  
“There's a device we need to save it in DC. Deep DC... It's part of a pre-war s-supply cache. You guys like that, right?” He felt a swell of pain from having to strain himself but snapped back from it. Bailey lightly tapped Luis’ leg to keep him conscious; the lightness of the blow was surprising, but the waster wondered if this was from the Outcast’s restraint or the severity of his other wounds catching up with him.  
“Keep talking.”  
“The boy's fading, Bailey,” warned Walt in a voice heavy with a mournful sympathy.  
Luis had to fight to stay coherent. “I'm wha- oh... goddamnit, this hurts... I've got a stimpak in the bag, near where the geomapper was.”  
That was his best if not only hope to make it through this. Stimpaks had become a staple of life in the Capital Wasteland, or even anywhere in the world Luis would wager. They were prewar wonder-drugs, syringes of hyper-adaptive stem cells that could heal a starling number of wounds, given some time to work for the severity of the trauma. Most had been looted at one point or another from the ruins of old-world buildings. The first places picked clean were obviously the hospitals, followed by the military outposts that had been hastily constructed to enact martial law in the final days of the war. Such measures had become commonplace when the public, vindicated posthumously, had rioted in fear that the world had inevitably damned the vast majority to death and the remaining few to a living hell. Many still persisted in household and office first-aid boxes, but the deliberate hunt for the odd, unlikely Stimpak often ended in the violent mutilation of those foolish or desperate enough to seek them at the hands of whatever horrors unwittingly guarded them, human or otherwise. Other methods to create them had been in development indefinitely with most attempts ending in failure or an inferior product. Fortunately for Luis, ‘most’ was not ‘all’.  
Bailey motioned to his subordinate, directing him towards the fallen satchel. At long last something else appears to pique Moses’ interest.  
“That's no small deal, either, Bailey.”  
“He's going to need that now,” stated Walt. Luis didn’t know what his life reading had told the Robo-Brain, but he was fairly sure he didn’t want to think about that. All the same, Moses rustled through the satchel.  
“Might as well use it on a mole-rat...”  
“Listen, he's checking for it, but there's no guarantee those raiders didn't break it in the process of doing this to you,” rationalized Bailey, preparing Luis for that possibility.  
“H-How about you gimme that first?” insisted a skeptical Luis, looking mistrustfully into the eye-slit of Bailey’s helmet. The slit was wider in each of the spots where a person’s eyes would be, and even had a heroic look to it when worn by a member of the Lyon’s Brotherhood when taken in context of the altruism that came to define their mission. On the Protector, the dark polymer that allowed crystal clear vision for the wearer and an impenetrable darkness for everyone else. They resembled the eyeless gaze of a skull, which made the whole exchange seem even more Faustian than Luis found it to be already. The Outcasts exchange a glance, and Moses gives what might have been a nod or perhaps he had shaken his head. It was hard to tell from the ground, but when distracted by the pain of buckshot digging into you with every motion, it became nigh impossible to discern. It was enough of a fight to stay conscious, let alone get a good look. Bailey pauses for a moment, slowly turning back to Luis and rising to his feet. As intimidating as he had been before, the Outcast at his full height may as well have been the size of a mutant. His body eclipsed the sun, casting the waster in shadows.  
“If you die here telling us nothing, there's no incentive for us to enter DC, certainly not with mutants swarming the place. You tell us exactly where it is and exactly what's hidden there or your friends walk in without the three fiercest warriors you’ll ever meet in tow.”  
“Damn syringe is broken, anyway,” muttered Moses.  
Luis hadn’t trusted the two of them for an instant, but even so, the satchel had been thrown and there was a decent enough chance that the Stimpak had broken on impact. More importantly, the others would need all the help they could get, even from brutes like these, if they were going to survive. He might have been even slower to answer, stayed silent, or even spat at them and chosen to keel over, but there was too much at stake. The rest of the group was still alive, though without the possibility of help from the Outcasts, that would almost certainly change. There weren’t words for the depths of mistrust that ran between the two of them, and yet Luis resolved to wager that their own self-interest would be enough to convince them to help raid...  
“The Capitol.”  
“Yes, DC, we know,” snapped Bailey, his patience starting to thin.  
“N-not the city... The b-building.” Luis was in far enough that he may as well tell them the truth. It presented an irresistible at any rate, especially for single-minded tech hunters like them. “We need to storm their bunker.”  
This hit Bailey harder than the Outcast could’ve expected. The Capitol building had been an urban-legend among the denizens of the wasteland, even spreading to The Brotherhood when Bailey and Moses had arrived in DC. It was deeper in the city than Lyons had made his Brothers and Sisters venture in that first push against the mutants. It was a damned place, swarming with an ever-swelling number of those freaks and not even Lyons’ current forces, triumphant against the Enclave and the unquestioned, supreme power in the region, had the muscle to drive them out entirely. In fact, the city had only grown more inhospitable since the brief but bloody war with the Enclave ended mere months ago. The ranks of the Brotherhood forces were depleted by the Outcasts’ exodus, with a quarter of their fighters departing one night with a third of their technology to follow the group’s true purpose.  
From there, Owyn Lyons’ insistence on laying down Brotherhood lives to shield wasters so they can continue their meaningless lives in the ruins and squalor they called home had only served to bleed The Brotherhood dry. Even without that war of choice, there was the need to combat the existential threat of the Enclave, and the mutants had handily seized the opportunity to push back with Lyons distracted. Those inhuman savages had always laid claim to the entirety of the city, until The Brotherhood had stemmed the tide- Bailey had fought to quarantine the bulk of their forces within the bounds of DC itself, though Moses had been too young at the time. As far as Bailey was concerned, it was either the most depraved, merciless place in the world, or at the very least a blisteringly close second. The Capitol building was thought to be one of their most secure mutant strongholds in all of DC and, to Bailey’s knowledge, there had never been a campaign to reach, much less loot it, that didn’t end in death. It was a sobering proposition.  
Walt’s brain tank was as expressive as one would expect, but the way his arms lowered was enough to tell he knew how such a mission would likely end. On the other side of the spectrum, Moses snorted in derision. The noise of this just emboldened Luis all the more.  
“And here I thought the rads melted off your kind's balls years ago.”  
“F-food, prewar tech running on generators strong enough to run for hundreds of years, complete digital libraries,” continued Luis, the seriousness of his words matched by the intensity of his glare. He turned to Bailey, smirking as he realized they couldn’t refuse. “Clean water s-systems… waiting to be rerouted-”  
“Well now.” Bailey’s posture softened, the wheels turning in his head at the implications and possibilities that would open if the Outcasts as an organization had access to their own source of pure, ample water. There would be no more stomaching the irradiated swill they had to settle for more often than Bailey would care to admit. It was distilled and even treated with doses of Rad-Away, but that could only filter out so much of the miserable taste of the world that it permeated in. Bailey was still deep in thought when Luis sweetened the bait even further.  
“The m-most informed, accurate record of the war until the bombs dropped, designs on how to rebuild and re-engineer God knows what... medicine, probably... It's all yours minus one item we need.” Here it comes, thought Luis. Will they accept what we need? Will they even listen? Am I saying too much? One way to find out...  
“That being?” asked the Outcast, voice thickening with suspicion.  
“Bomb disposal gear and the instructions for h-how to use it. Good deal, right?”  
Luis flinched, hoping that the terms were acceptable for a pair of technological zealots, but it was after all, a very reasonable price to ask. He had bartered away everything else, but where was the sense in offering a bit of it when their odds of reaching the bunker without the Outcasts were so poor in the first place?  
“That it is,” said Bailey, his reserved tone holding back an audible hunger for the contents of the Capitol. “Rendezvous is in how long?”  
“Th-three hours at the marked warehouse.”  
“You heard the local. Move out.”  
And with that, Bailey turned to his squad, beckoning them to move as the geomapper directs them. Moses tosses the satchel back on the ground, having stripped it of anything of value: some bottle caps, the universal currency of the wastes, a box of 10mm pistol cartridges, likely compatible with the submachine gun on his hip, and a bottle of The Lyons Brotherhood’s purified water from their newly functional processor on the Potomac. It was the last of his water, but Luis couldn’t manage to care. The wounds in his chest were severe and he was already beginning to feel lightheaded. He most likely wouldn’t be needing what had been taken; he doubted he’d need much of anything soon, but then a thought bolted through his mind, something that had almost slipped away in his single-minded need to convince the Outcasts to ally with what was left of the Megaton expedition. He wouldn’t beg them to save him; that was improbable with a Stimpak and impossible without one, even if Bailey and his crew had cared to. He would only ask them to send a message, weakly hoping that they had enough respect for human life that they would at least honor a simple final request. Luis willed himself up and with a voice as tired as it was sincere in its appeal, he called to them.  
“Wait... If you meet Jacobs, tell her I'm sorry.”  
The Outcasts continued on, not bothering to respond or even grace him with so much as an affirmative grunt. He doubted they would, but at the very least, they might be able to help his people. Any comfort he might have had was short-lived however, when Moses casually passed Bailey the Stimpak from his bag, a rough design but wholly intact. Bailey holsters it in the side of his suit, a section of his thigh plate reserved for medical supplies. Luis’ fury boiled as he saw the Protector put the syringe away in the hollow of his thigh plate, joining the lonely roll of gauze that had rested there beforehand.  
“This is big. Like the find of the century!” exclaimed Moses in anticipation of a deed fit for legends and the thought of all sorts of foes ahead of him unwittingly waiting for their turn to burn. The Robo-Brain next to him at least had the grace to sound contrite as he spoke.  
“You two just left him like that?” The voice was less disbelief than disappointment, leaving Luis to think they’d done this before. Bailey’s cynical response only served to reinforce this thought.  
“Walt, those supplies and designs are worth more than a thousand scavvies like that one. Getting there, we need all of the resources possible, and if that means some things like our good friend have to die-”  
“You mean to say Megaton?”  
“If need be.”  
“It's that kind of thinking that has your numbers so limited,” retorted Walt, in a tone of pained restraint, though his pain was nothing compared to that of the waster they’d left to die. Luis gritted his teeth, his rage enough to get him to his knees, breathing heavily and dripping with blood.  
“YOU HEARTLESS, TIN CAN SONS OF BITCHES!” he shouted with all of his might. The Outcasts didn’t even bother turning to see him. He couldn’t believe he’d told them as much as he had. Yes, they had saved his life, but out of coincidence and for only a handful of minutes judging by the sensations sweeping over him; now those same sensations were trying their damnedest to drop his body to the ground. Had he doomed the others? The Outcasts wouldn’t slaughter them blindly; they stood to gain too much, but he’d sent the three of them to meet the last hope of his civilization- to meet her. They need to keep her safe. If they can’t, I need to get to her. She had always been the strong one, but with them, without him? He put all of his might into rising to his feet. Stumbling, he stabilized. I need to get to her! Luis put forth his right foot, but it felt as if it was made of solid lead. Despite his determination, the second step broke him. He fell, scraping on the ragged asphalt, staring helplessly at the Outcasts as they vanished into the distance.  
Hearing the struggle, the Outcasts hadn’t looked back, though the sounds of Luis’ agony painted a vivid picture. Bailey never took his eyes off the path; whether he was steeped in thought or reflecting on Luis’ demise, his silence was as enigmatic as it had been merciless. Moses had no such inclinations to leave his views to interpretation, inclining his head slightly to Walt in a sneering rebuke.  
“It's thinking like that that puts your kind in a jar and his kind in the ground.”


	2. Broken Chain

The Citadel, 2276

Thicker than the walls of the prewar military installation that housed the East Coast Brotherhood, something else permeated the air of the Citadel. Bailey had sensed it for years, even more than a decade if he was being honest. It smelled of death, hovering over every paladin that ventured out on a mission to the city. It wasn’t fear; that had long since been burned away. It seemed that most of his fellows, the sullen Brothers he passed in the hall as he returned to base and they headed out to fight and quite possibly die for a cause they had never believed in. It was discontentment, and though none said a word to each other openly about it, they all knew where it led.

There were elements of hate to it, that much was beyond doubt, but it was a different sort than the hate that fueled his every hammer blow. The mutants had bled them dry, with the effort to contain those towering monstrosities claiming more Brotherhood lives than he had thought such a simpleminded species could, even when considering their numbers. Bailey held them responsible for all the deaths, but in a way, it made sense. Like the mythical creatures in the holotapes he had pooled over in his youth, they were monsters to be slain. A dragon didn’t have the capacity to question why it ravaged anyone who happened by or burned cities to the ground. That was just what they did, the great, simple, stupid creatures. Mutants were much the same as ferals and deathclaws when it came down to it. They could talk, but it was usually to say nothing more complex than a child of eight could. A mutant’s lot was to kill in blind, undiscriminating fury if it was a good day. If not… being taken alive proved to be agonizing beyond description. They were brutal beings of instinct and wrath with no respect for what had once made them human, but deep down, Bailey knew that the Brotherhood’s current, sorry state was not on them alone.

Aside from the rare few that kept enough sense to think in terms of rudimentary tactics, muties weren’t smart enough to mastermind a coordinated campaign and wouldn’t have been able to take the fight to the Brotherhood in any conventional sense. Most of them barely understood the concept of cover, though to be fair, many of them were large enough that they stopped needing it. The war hadn’t been their notion because they could hardly form a notion between all the members of their endless, grotesque horde. This all fell on him.

They had set out twenty years back because of the Elders’ commands and had followed the Star Paladin they’d wished to be rid of. They couldn’t have known what he’d become- Bailey had no idea back then either. When he ordered them to scourge the Pitt, the picture of a perfect leader that had guided them across the crackling remains of a long-dead nation began to slip. The things he made them fight… it still kept Bailey up at night, panicking that he was back in the steel mill they were to capture, splintered bodies of what could nominally called humans piled up to his knees. They’d been ordered to capture the mill and rescue anyone capable of being rescued, killing everything that put up resistance. 

They did a service for the world; the savages of the Pitt made the locals of the Capital Wasteland look like an angelic bunch of utopians by comparison, but where did it get them? Lyons ordered them to abandon the mill when he got a good look at it and the building that his Brothers bled for, with one of them even dying in the siege, wasn’t up to his standards. The only thing they left with was the refugees, around a hundred, the vast majority of whom died of infected wounds or disease not long thereafter. Those who hadn’t were inducted as initiates- spitting in the face of protocol- and were then shoved into the same meat grinder as the rest of the Brotherhood in case Bailey still doubted it was all done in vain.

When they got to the Capital Wasteland, its wasters were more civilized than those of the Pitt, but that wasn’t saying much. The remains of the nearby city, the nation’s capital, had been overrun with mutants and the Star Paladin wasted no time in beginning a full-scale war with them. At first, it had been easy enough. The mutants in the early years were completely uncoordinated and still fought amongst themselves to the point that the infighting had left them hopelessly vulnerable to Brotherhood skirmishers. The casualties had been acceptably light in the first few years and Lyons had been able to accomplish a spectacular victory in the form of seizing the ruins of a prewar military installation with all the technology it held inside. “The Pentagon” had been a central node in America’s defense department and the discoveries within had been staggering. Rows of prototype designs, records of methods of preserving and salvaging the suits of T-45d power armor that had grown out of date on the course of the great war, stores of auto-turrets to combat rioters and looters should they rise up in DC as they had in other isolated urban pockets, surveillance technology, information on the area, its landmarks, and terrain, masses of comms equipment, and laser weaponry to be tested and shipped out were among the impressive spoils of war, but they all paled in comparison to the greatest find of all. 

In the lowest levels of the facility, the Brotherhood had uncovered nothing short of a slumbering titan. Standing at forty feet, with a reactor capable of powering half the wasteland in his chest and a cache of tactical nuclear devices on his back, Liberty Prime, the ace America had been building up its sleeve, stood motionless, the arms at his side the size of cars and his legs each thick with enough plating that even plasma weapons would only scratch the paint. On its head was a blue visor that had been built to scan as much as it had been built to fire an eye-laser from the largest Tesla Cannon in all likelihood ever constructed. It remained the one thing in Bailey’s life that never failed to draw the same reaction from everyone that saw it: wonder, for some bordering on reverence and for others eroding into terror, but for that first moment, speechless disbelief. Such was also the reaction of the Elders back west when they received word of it by all accounts. It was this discovery that earned Owyn Lyons his promotion to elder, but the days of following orders and living up to the Brotherhood’s ideals as they were raised to observe them would come to an end shortly thereafter.

The change didn’t happen overnight, but slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, the mutants were getting more clever- not in the sense that they displayed a greater sense of intellect individually, but in that the war bands the Brotherhood faced more often carried what could be called standardized weaponry if that hadn’t been impossible for them to grasp. Their leaders wore less of whatever garbage they felt like wearing on a whim and more of a trend towards crude armor, but in a way that displayed a sense of rank and cohesion. Little by little, the mutants not only regained much of the territory that the Brotherhood had taken from inside the city but had begun a campaign of aggressive expansion that caused patrols to be caught off guard and wiped out to a man if they ventured too far into enemy territory. It would have been a phenomenal time to activate Liberty Prime, but therein was the catch. The reason it had seen delays beyond count and not a second of action in the field was because it consumed, well, near as much power as the entirety of the Wasteland. It had sat there for two centuries and never moved an inch for all the marvels contained within it. As it had been in the days of the Great War, Liberty Prime remained at base with all the military utility of a pile of rocks five stories high.

The mutants eradicated local settlements left and right, with those who hadn’t been killed outright being taken to replenish their numbers. More and more it seemed that the locals stopped fighting and chose to run for their lives, which the mutants graciously allowed them to keep, though only after dragging them off to god knows where and transforming them into more of those hulking, shouting abominations. Lyons hadn’t reacted initially beyond having the Brotherhood hold position and protect both technology and their own, but after receiving enough reports of the locals capitulating under the force of the onslaught, he resolved to unleash the full might of the Brotherhood on the mutant menace. The start bore no similarity to the fighting they had experienced until that point. Sure, they were no smarter than they had been on an individual basis, but when one wave was wiped out, another took its place, angrier and more numerous than the last. It took years and everything each soldier in the Brotherhood had to give before they had once again been forced behind the older boundaries within the city with comparatively small packets of resistance across the countryside, but the price had been impossibly steep.

It was a war of attrition with an enemy that without the capacity for weariness. The mutants were practically all brain-damaged as a side-effect of the metamorphosis, but in exchange, they stood at an average of eight feet for the small ones loaded with muscle, immune to disease, and at home in radiation. They had originally been an experiment to force humanity to adapt to the imminent conditions of the apocalypse through the Forced Evolutionary Virus and the results had been exceedingly successful in terms of the physical. 

One on one, they could go toe to toe with power armor. Their own armor was rather pathetic, the bulk of it being made of welded scrap and spare tires, but this was countered by the fact that the biggest among them had musculature so dense that it rivalled the protection of power armor too. While some took comfort in believing that the largest of their warriors had fallen in the first stages of the conflict, whether to the Brotherhood or infighting, they would not find this comfort justified. As the years went by, it became abundantly clear that mutants didn’t grow frail in their old age- they just grew, becoming impossibly massive, the most ancient among them reaching half the size of Liberty Prime and losing all but the basest vestiges of the relative sentience they once possessed.

And who was it that charged into battle against them in the vicarious defense of the ‘people’ of the DC metropolitan area but Elder Owyn Lyons’ Brotherhood of Steel. It seemed like no one to most Brothers, and many of the locals still deigned to shoot at them, like the raiders that sought to loot the power armor that soaked up mutant bullets for their ungrateful asses or the slavers that would occasionally try to sneak up on sleeping Brothers in the field to strap a bomb collar to their necks. Almost as bad were the cities. Sure, they claimed they didn’t have the muscle to help, but did any of them ever lift a finger to deliver so much as supplies? Never. Downtown DC was the Brotherhood’s problem as far as they were concerned, infuriatingly indifferent that the presence of its soldiers was the only thing keeping them from being dragged off in the middle of the night by a war party of muties.

That hadn’t been strictly true though, Bailey had to admit, though not because the locals truly appreciated anything being done for them. Rivet City, the partially shored backmost two thirds of a prewar battleship, had the gall to request Brotherhood protection for an experiment they had in mind that involved constructing a massive purifier to turn the entirety of the Potomac river into clear, drinkable water. It was most likely a fantasy, and at any rate, the Brotherhood had as much acceptably pure tap water with stockpiles of purified bottles, as it could hope to need for at least another fifty years. Of course, Lyons didn’t refuse them, giving the head scientist his own newly-minted Star Paladin, a woman named Cross, as his personal bodyguard. Bailey had known Cross, as she was likely the only member of the Brotherhood that might wield a super sledge with enough skill to best him. He’d learned a great deal from watching her train and even more from their sparring. She was unflinching in her commitment to Lyons, never flinching at any order that was given to her. 

In the first years, she sat out the war with the mutants to watch that local and his family at the elder’s behest, only returning when the local’s wife died in childbirth and Lyons allowed him to call off the experiment that spanned several years and consumed countless Brotherhood resources to bring him to a vault where he could give up and live out his days in obscurity. That Lyons would allow so much Brotherhood involvement, including protection, technology, and even his best scribes to share knowledge with outsiders was horrendous, but when the man responsible for leading him on this absurd journey decided he’d had enough, the leader of the Brotherhood allowed him to pick up and leave? If he had dared to tell other leading figures in the Brotherhood he wanted to pull the plug, they’d just as quickly have broken his legs and forced him to fulfill the promise he’d made that their Brothers had died protecting, and with each passing day, the thought crossed Bailey’s mind increasingly often.

That had been sixteen years ago, when as bad as things were, they still had the troops to keep to this doomed holding strategy, but recently, even that hadn’t been enough of an extraneous drain on resources for the Lyons’ liking. In ’72, Lyons insisted on helping with the launch of Galaxy News Radio, giving complete control of the only functional radio station of its kind to the first charismatic local who gave him a pitch instead of establishing a comms center through which the Brotherhood could better coordinate the endless war he had pushed them to fight. He had promised the self-proclaimed ‘disc jockey’, a man who called himself “Three Dog”, the run of the station with all the autonomy that came with it, and- of course- a modest garrison of Brotherhood troops to fight and all likelihood die for him should any mutants accost him while he cracked wise and played music at all hours of the day. It achieved considerable popularity among the locals, but even though he freely spoke positively of the Brotherhood, the only attention this seemed to attract was the kind from leeches.

Every so often, refugees would stumble by the Citadel, pleading for help. Growing increasingly soft with age, Lyons allowed them passage in, but to the beleaguered astonishment of all walks of the Brotherhood rank and file, he allowed them to remain on as initiates when it appeared they wouldn’t keel over on the spot. Most of them that wandered in weren’t warriors. Those either stayed on as guards, living comfortable lives in one of the cities, forged their own paths as raiders, taking whatever they pleased from the weak, or joined a mercenary company, a handful of such companies in the area having grown large enough that they would give the Brotherhood pause, though not outright threaten it militarily as far as could be told. Instead, the coughing, shambling, ailing corpses with pulses that inundated the Citadel asking for help were either too young or too old to be of much practical use in a fight, but would exhaust an unprecedented amount of clean water, food, and medical supplies well before they were of possessed anything vaguely reminiscent of helpful skills or aptitudes. 

There were some thieves among them, though thankfully the knights in charge of watching the refugees were headed by Paladin Henry Casdin, one of the few who had the mindset and the leeway from Lyons to ensure that it didn’t go on for long. After a pair of locals the Brotherhood had allowed in had been caught filling their packs with tech valuable enough to buy their way into one of the wasteland’s raider factions’ good graces, the resulting firing squad made sure that the idea wouldn’t catch on. Thievery never plagued the Citadel again, and thanks to Lyons’ selective enforcement of the Brotherhood codex, trade never would either as merchants seeking to buy any surplus technology were thankfully turned away as well. He hadn’t sunk to that at least, but before long, his reasoning for open recruitment as opposed to drawing generations of elite soldiers from the Brotherhood’s old bloodlines became all too clear.

The casualties from the war with the mutants were staggering. Of the fifteen hundred that had marched east, they’d lost nearly four hundred over the twenty years of fighting, with many of the wounded having been scarcely patched up before being called back to the field out of necessity. The three hundred locals inducted varied from hard-cases to lost causes, but none could honestly say that their addition could even begin to offset the losses. Most of the fallen had been the most seasoned and skilled of the expedition, most of them paladins. They had been some of the most noble, fearsome warriors Bailey had ever met and it had been with pride that he had joined their ranks upon receiving his promotion two years ago for the valor he had shown in helping hold the line in the mutants’ previous campaign. Part of him suspected it had been to bolster the ranks of the paladin order that had been quickly bleeding itself dry containing the bulk of the mutants’ forces but achieving the distinction had been his fondest aspiration from as far back as his childhood. It took him until now to realize how hollow the title is when he was not allowed to live up to it. He never got to find his own Liberty Prime to bring back to the Brotherhood, nor any forgotten medical breakthrough that had been buried in the rubble. The only things he seemed to find nowadays were the feeling of emptiness that came with protecting locals who neither wanted nor deserved his protection and the names of those he knew and loved added to the memorial at the Citadel.

When a Brother died, of any rank, the identifying holotag they wore was taken from around their neck and handed in to the scribe in charge of such matters. In the case of the Citadel, Scribe Jameson, with her sorrowful hazel eyes under unkempt, bushy eyebrows and a mop of sandy hair she never had the downtime to comb, had the charge of the archive, the record of all Brothers that fell in the history of the Capital Wasteland chapter. On the rare occasion she had cause to smile, her face rang of courtesy, though any sense of joy had been drained seemingly permanently by the weight of her morbid assignment. Bailey recalled his last run-in with her; turning in the set of tags he had had been one of the hardest experiences of his life. Her expression had commiserated with him, but while he appreciated the condolences, he thought to himself this is the last time I bury someone for Lyons’ dream. He’d seen friends die. Many of the initiates who had first tasted battle with him at the Pitt were among the dead. People he trusted with his life bled their last drop of blood in the defense of the locals and for what? Would the locals ever know them or even appreciate the Brotherhood any more than it has? It was doubtful; so many of his friends had gone into the city only to return as mutilated bodies with an arm blown off by a mutant that would’ve captured some scavengers in the downtown DC area, shot full of holes by a mutant that would’ve raided Rivet City, had their head smashed in by a mutant that would’ve cut Three Dog in two, or even get torn to shreds beyond any recognition save the holotags by a mutant that would’ve burned Megaton to the ground. Only it wasn’t just friends, was it? This was war and the mutants scarcely discriminated. Friends, lovers, family, heroes… Brothers all, each of them worth fifty savages on a bad day, gone forever and the Brotherhood, which gave them everything they knew, most notably a sense of purpose, of belonging, had all but been extinguished under the command of Owyn Lyons. When the word came through that the Lost Hills Elders, the highest of all the Brotherhood, had excommunicated Lyons for the abandonment of his orders after taking up his self-imposed altruistic suicide mission, the Citadel nearly tore itself asunder in the uproar, and would have if not for the calls for calm from Lyons’ most faithful. Throughout the months however, as the faithful’s numbers thinned during an especially precarious push by the mutants. Many had been deployed to hold an increasingly untenable border and more still had died due to the mutants deliberately focusing on the murder of officers as the new crux of their strategy. The soldiers back at the Citadel had felt that the balance had tipped, and the abuses of the Lyons regime had gone unanswered for too long.

It hadn’t been a quick process, and for some, it had risen from the ashes of the Pitt. Murmurs persisted about Lyons’ ability to lead, and how the elders had banished him in all but name because of his loose regard for tradition and the Codex. Bailey had dismissed it at first, as did most of the Brothers present, but in time, seeing how his priorities shifted, it became a sentiment he couldn’t shake so easily. It appeared to be a growing sentiment to the point that a majority of the conversations around the base boiled down to whether or not the Elder had started to go insane, though some had the grace to soften the accusation to ‘going senile’. The first instance he can recall of getting caught up in it was when he had been up for his promotion to paladin, recovering from an injury as Knight Morgan, on guard duty under the orders of Paladin Casdin, dropped by the med-bay and struck up a conversation, which hadn’t taken long to turn to what some may have termed the start of treason.

“Next thing you know”, began Morgan, her brow furrowing with frustration at the thought, “he’s going to send every one of us out to Rivet City and have us push the ship back together from the bottom of the river.”

“We’d drown.”

“Are you so sure he’d care?” Bailey chuckled sardonically at that as her dark eyes lit up at finding someone who let her vocalize her disapproval. Even so, she presumed too much; he hadn’t been a fan of how Lyons had been carrying on, but he still wanted to believe that there was still hope that Lyons could lead them out of this.

“It wasn’t all that long ago he was in here for spearheading the defense of the metro tunnels in ’68. Remember how they rushed him back here for triage when the grenade tore up his leg? He nearly had to have it taken off. You don’t get hurt on the front lines like that if you don’t care.”

“Alright, do you remember what kind of shape Cross was in after trying to push him out of the way of that? Remember how it punched through her spine? She’d already taken a few bullets that day. When they rushed her back here, she DID lose parts of her leg, not to mention a chunk of her spine.”

“He had them patch her up.”

“In an experimental procedure.”

“That left her stronger than ever.”

“Well wasn’t she lucky? Most of them that were wounded that day had to heal back with stimpaks and physical therapy, but not his pet. You know, the one that’s never left his side since.”

“She’s his bodyguard, what do you expect?”

“We have a fucking cyborg and the elder keeps him guarding himself back at base at all times? Ever since she got those robot bits, it’s beyond a doubt she’s our best melee fighter.”

“Hey!”

“Can you overpower a mutant?”

“Yes.”

“How about without your armor?”

“… I’ve still got technique.”

“She does too, but he isn’t about to send her out to show us or the muties any time soon. You don’t honestly think we can keep this up forever, do you?”

“Are you implying the Brotherhood’s gonna crack anytime soon?”

“I didn’t say anytime soon, but we need to course correct before it comes to that. In all the time we’ve been here, have you ever thought we’d come close to turning the tables in a significant way?”

“What’re we supposed to do? Storm their base we’re not even sure exists? Kill the leader we don’t even know if they have? Maybe it’s nothing as big as that; it could be we just hit them hard enough the freaks realized they had to unite against us or get wiped out.”

“Did we even manage to do that much? Was there ever a point in the war where we almost broke their spirit, or is their real strength that they’re too fucking dumb to know their spirit should have broken?”

“At this point, I just kill the bastards and hope for the best.”

“How’s that been working out for us? Have you seen the casualties?”

“I have, but what about the Chain that Binds?”

“You mean the idea that all members of the Brotherhood have a duty to follow orders?”

“We did swear to.” He knew it was a poor excuse, but Bailey wanted any reason he could find to not cross the line he felt coming.

“Now you sound like your Paladin.”

“That’s not a bad thing.”

“Not until you lose someone you can’t overlook. And about the Chain that Binds, ever since Lost Hills excommunicated Lyons, where exactly does that leave us?”

Bailey couldn’t answer that and holding his tongue, he leaned in, conceding she’d earned this much.

“Talk.”

Her face lit up with all the energy of a labor instigator from the days before the war and she spoke in a hushed tone that dripped with gravity as much as anxiety.

“We could make this right.”

“We? I’m not a part of this.”

“… I don’t necessarily mean you.”

“I almost forgot you’re Casdin’s pet.”

“Shut the fuck up. I’m someone that sees him for what he can be.”

“A rebel? A traitor?”

“No! Absolutely not. A loyalist to the Brotherhood and the Codex.”

“So it is Casdin. What’s he gonna do, kill the old man?”

“I never said that. Or anything remotely similar.”

“Just tell me what the plan is already so I can tell you where to shove it.”

“We give people the chance to choose. The Brotherhood or the disgraced elder.”

“And both sides just let the other live on their own?”

“Ideally, they all choose correctly-”

“But when they don’t?”

“They take it up with us once we’re established, far away from here doing the real work we were sent to accomplish.”

“What were you, twelve went they sent us out here?”

“You must’ve been sixteen and probably still are seeing as how your balls haven’t dropped.”

“I’m a late bloomer.”

“Let’s hope so. Think about it, Bailey. This is the only way we get to avoid more bloodshed. We flip the Brotherhood and we get things back on track.”

“You’re not going to get away with it. There’s too many left with too much faith left in him.” Her expression hardened at the thought of the elder.

“Lyons ought to see to that before long.”

Now, two years and countless casualties later, a somber Bailey went through the halls of the Citadel to find Paladin Casdin. Part of him regretted turning in the holotags he had given to Scribe Jameson and it was the same part of him that hounded his thoughts saying If you had lived up to the oath you swore those years back, you wouldn’t be here, hanging your head as you trawled these sullen halls looking for the man that might’ve put a stop to it all. Even now, the thought of joining this… conspiracy… was enough to turn his stomach, but he had made the decision as the tags left his hands that this would be the last set of tags he brought back for one of the senselessly gallant martyrs that gave their lives for the vanity project of the traitor Owyn Lyons. It had to be done… for those left alive.

He approached the door to the meeting room, an unassuming office overlooking the massive testing facility that housed Liberty Prime and served as the hub of the Brotherhood’s array of equipment. A pair of Brothers clad in full armor stood guard, each with an AER-7 laser pistol holstered at their side, but turned to him, their suspicion stopping just short of hostility. The one Bailey recognized immediately was Knight Sibley, a brute of a man that Bailey suspected more resented Lyons for the compassion he displayed than his dismissal of the codex. He was someone that made the paladin’s skin crawl, but his commitment to derail the current regime had been beyond reproach. The gruffness of his personality was sure to keep anyone away that wasn’t meant to be there, so in addition to keeping him out of the meeting determining the methods of the rebellion, he served as a capable, unwitting deterrent. Sibley had held up a hand to stop Bailey, though he knew full well they served the same cause. 

The other guard had followed his lead without any of the malice that Sibley could use to so effortlessly unnerve those around him. He made the mistake of putting his hand over the grip of his pistol still in the holster. Bailey had been unarmed, as had been a condition of attendance and wore the tactical mesh that served both as an interface suit for his power armor and the Brotherhood’s equivalent of fatigues. There had been no need for the posturing on Sibley’s part or that of his sidekick. Bailey didn’t recognize the subordinate’s posture specifically, but from how they stood, it was clear the person inside was an initiate, barely bloodied if at all, and convinced that being Sibley’s crony would give them the toughness they would need to survive in the brave new world that was about to unfold. The paladin struck the initiate with his thousand-yard stare, prying into their very soul and sending their hand off their weapon and into a tensely apologetic salute.

Sibley cackled, walking up to Bailey.

“Shit, man. That was priceless!” He turned to his young charge. “You see that, initiate? Stick with me and maybe one day I’ll teach you how to get looked at without pissing yourself. As for you, latecomer, about time you owned up. It only took you two years to get your head out of your ass.” If one kindly thing could be said of Sibley, it would be the courage with which he spoke truth to power; it was a shame it was always in such a sour tone. How he won over even a single acolyte was beyond Bailey’s comprehension, though that was hardly of consequence.

“Still didn’t make it into the meeting? I can’t imagine why.”

“They needed someone they could trust holding the gate.”

“Because you two are the finest the Brotherhood has to offer. That’s why you get to follow the orders the heavyweights get to make.”

“You got something you wanna say to me, fuckface?”

“’We guard humanity’s spark.’”

“’Lest they unleash the fire.’ Get out of my sight.”

With that, Sibley reluctantly stepped aside and his timid partner followed suit albeit more hurriedly.

Inside, his eyes meet those of his apparent allies in the insurrection as they gathered for the briefing. Morgan, who had been the one he turned to, tail between his legs when the last straw had fallen, sat in the chair closest to the door, her deep brown eyes wrinkling in the slightest hint of a smile as she saw him, giving a brief nod of approval. Behind her, Knight Rockfowl leaned against the wall, his thick hair combed into a neat part. He was easily the calmest in the room though that was doubtless because he almost never worked up anything resembling anger. Such was his unflappability that gave him a considerable following. 

Across the table, Scribe Olin was a chimney, already on her second pack from the looks of the discarded cigarette box and the palpable smoke in the room. The piercing platinum blonde of her hair had been pinned firmly into place and was about the only thing you could see from her shoulders up due to the unintended smokescreen. She was easily the smartest in the room scientifically speaking and carried with her the support of many other Brotherhood researchers tired of using their time to engineer shelters for the refugees rather than getting to uncover the secrets that humanity had left littered across the wasteland. Beside her, as always, was Paladin McGraw. Of all the people here, Bailey had thought him the oddest fit. Notoriously honorable, even to the locals when he encountered them, McGraw had been the picture of the Brotherhood’s chivalry, but it would seem that even he had gotten his fill of the endless sorties in mutant territory that seemed to accomplish less and cost more with each trek. It was just as likely that he had been swayed by Olin, the two of them being inseparable.

Apart, they were influential, but together they posed as great an existential threat to the Lyons regime as the mutants ever had. However, for all of their clout, the one that he hadn’t seen yet was the most powerful of all. It had taken Bailey a moment to see him behind the smoke, but Paladin Henry Casdin stared hard out the window, gazing into the facility below that buzzed with the activity of scribes carrying out tests in service of tech to prop up the endless war or the provide for the refugees. How much more could be done to advance either of those counts? What could have been found if they would’ve devoted more time towards discovery? These were questions that weighed heavily on all present, especially Casdin. He was ten years older than Bailey and he wore them with the years for all to see with the wrinkles on his face that only deepened with every patrol he was tasked with dispatching after choosing the crew that would remain as the Citadel’s reserves and internal affairs. To his credit, the reason the old man had chosen him was Casdin’s commitment to a fair distribution of duties. The orders had become impossible for Casdin to manage as half of the soldiers that saw action shared his view of Lyons’ assignments taking on a stronger and stronger resemblance to suicide missions. Whether the other half was too blindly loyal to say otherwise or too dense to see the writing on the wall, he couldn’t say, but he had gotten his fill of sending out good soldiers for nothing more than protecting the simpletons that spat on them.

“Bailey,” said Casdin, his expression softening with what passed for relief these days. “Took your sweet time, didn’t you?”

“Sorry about that. Sibley was being a prick.”

“I meant in years, Paladin.”

“It isn’t a choice I made lightly.”

“I know; and I understand why it pained you the way it did. I’m sorry it wasn’t possible sooner.”

“I couldn’t say with certainty I’d be here if you had asked sooner. Do you understand the risks involved in what you’re doing?”

“Just as well as you understand the risks involved if we don’t,” quipped McGraw with the familiar, sincere tone that never seemed to leave his voice.

“Can we trust him?” asked Olin, lighting up a fresh cigarette with the her prior one, now burned down to its filter.

“He doesn’t exactly have anywhere else to turn,” began Morgan, staring him dead in the eye from her seat and finding not a glare, not even a shred of token defiance looking back at her; only hurt fresh hurt laid bare. “His last links to the Lyons camp are gone and he’s inclined to save what little he can. You’re among friends, Bailey. You may as well be honest; no one’s gonna feed you the old man’s script this time.” She gently shoved out the seat next to her that her foot had been resting on. Bailey would’ve been insulted if what she said hadn’t been so accurate and her new expression hadn’t turned so inviting. Despite his trepidations of the whole enterprise, he sat down, turning to Rockfowl.

“How about you? Anything to say?”

“Only that we’re all here for the same reason, but Casdin says it better than I do. Boss-man, take it away.” With that, Casdin gave the room a once over and rolled out a floor plan of the Citadel for all to see.

“This isn’t going to be a typical revolution. We aren’t staging a coup; there are few enough left in the Brotherhood as it is and no one wants to make the casualties any higher than they need to be. At least no one in this room. Lyons and a number of his familiars are going to be inspecting the DC battlements since we’ve been getting word the mutants have been pooling for another surge a number of the fortifications on the national mall reportedly aren’t in the shape they need to be.”

“Is that true?” asked Bailey, the worry of leaving his Brothers, no matter how misled, during a surge struck him as cowardly and unthinkable.

“That’s what Lyons will believe,” replied Casdin with a smirk. “The reality of the matter is that we’ve smashed them something fierce for the time being. Odds are, they won’t be able or at the very least willing to launch another campaign until ’78 at the earliest, but this will be cause enough for the bulk of his hardline to hit the field as he reinforces areas that are swarmed with suspiciously loud silence. Up until now, I’ve given him no cause to doubt my assignments, but once he sees what we’ve done, it’ll be too late for him to reach the Citadel in time.”

“What about the Brothers giving those reports?” probed McGraw.

“If the timing works out, they’ll be at our rendezvous point be the time Lyons is scratching his ass in forts halfway across the city behind the furthest Brotherhood lines.”

“Here’s the best part,” added Morgan. “Who’s left in charge of Citadel security?”

"You're looking at them," said Casdin, motioning to all present. 

“This could work, although there’s gonna be a handful of people left over that won’t look too kindly on whatever it is we’re doing.”

“You’d be surprised how many see things the way we do,” noted a bittersweet Rockfowl. “In the mess halls and barracks, Lyons’ name gets dragged through the mud. It ain’t healthy, but it’s true.”

“After all he’s done, I thought you’d sound happier,” scoffed Olin.

“The old man wasn’t always like this. I still like the guy if I’m being perfectly honest, but I can’t let him go on leading me if he’s gonna keep ignoring the mission they put us here to accomplish,” confessed Rockfowl.

“It’s good you see it that way,” said Casdin. “Odds are, the bulk of those who haven’t either signed on with us or are square for Lyons think that way. If this makes sense with you and we keep the mood of it right, we can look at double what we can already count on, maybe more.”

“How many can we count on right out of the gate?” pressed Bailey.

“One hundred fifty Brothers in full power armor when the time comes to move.”

“What?! That’s nearly a tenth of the Brotherhood.”

“And those are just the ones we know. Lyons is taking two hundred of his firmest believers, so that leaves just under a thousand back at base. Of that, a quarter are ‘reformed’ locals, refugees mostly, not likely to cause much of a fuss. Including our men, there’s going to be a bit over seven hundred born Brothers holed up in these halls. If we’re the only ones in armor, and I expect another hundred to take up the call once it becomes clear what we’re doing, we just might be able to pull this off. Bailey?”

“Casdin?”

“I need you to lead a squad of ten to watch the A-Ring. Any stragglers of Lyons’ elite are going to be there if the old man realizes what’s going to happen.”

The Lyons’ Pride, handpicked for their skill in battle and their dauntless commitment to the old man’s mission, these would not only be the only battle-hardened Brothers that would never bend to Casdin’s rebellion, but they presented the greatest threat it faced. If anyone could rally the rank and file into a mob wild enough to overwhelm the armored conspirators, it would be Sentinel Sarah Lyons’ band of special forces. 

Acting autonomously from the guards Casdin coordinated, there wouldn’t be any guarantee they’d be away from the Citadel. Their best hope would be that Lyons’ daughter would be inclined to escort her father through the lines of the Brotherhood’s DC encampments. Any of the others were influential, but Sarah Lyons hadn’t earned the coveted position of Sentinel with nepotism. Even the most ardent among the conspirators had to admit she was as fearsome as Lyons had been back in his heyday as a warrior. Under her leadership, the Pride had transformed from elite protectors to vanguards, blunting the mutant assaults at their thickest points and giving none room to question Sarah’s place as the Brotherhood’s second in command. The rebellion hinged on the suppression of the Pride’s influence and it was a duty that fell squarely to Bailey. It got to the point that he wondered if they needed him to jump on the grenade, what would the rest of them even be doing? It was a question Casdin was quick to answer as he turned to-

"Olin?”

“Casdin?”

"Are your scribes ready to move when the time comes?”

Scribes? Bailey hadn’t considered what role the Brotherhood’s corps of researchers and engineers would have in the revolt. What exactly do they have your people doing?

“Can you give me the escort I need?”

“We’re going to be stretched thin locking down the hallways while you get your job done.”

“If we can’t complete our assignment, what’s the point of leaving in the first place?” 

“The best I can do is promise enough suits of armor to cover any volunteers that might step forward to help you. Friendly armors have been tagged with a red line on the left shoulder, and anyone looking to join the cause is going to be sent to join you on top of the thirty knights I’m giving you to start.” Olin stepped up to the window beside him, her eyes racing across the field of view. Behind Olin, Rockfowl put cans of red spray-paint on the table, Morgan seizing one eagerly, Casdin sternly, McGraw conflictedly, and Rockfowl himself with a disquieting casualness. With this they’d brand themselves and their followers, and no matter what Lyons and his sycophants would say this made them, to Bailey, it made them the Brotherhood’s true protectors; the only issue remained why it was so hard for him to grab the paint for himself. 

“I still can’t believe this…” said Olin, back turned but eyes racing over the lab beneath them in the reflection of the glass. “In a couple nights, everything here is going to be ours for the taking. All of the tech, as much as we can carry, whatever parts of it we need to carry on a real cause.” 

Bailey considered the effects it would have on those that stayed. What would be left for them? We’re taking the better part of two hundred of the best and brightest Lyons’ dream has seen fit to spare, the equipment to settle ourselves a proper base, and the guns to defend it. What would that leave them? Many of those who would remain were semi-educated locals more fit to beat each other with bats over a pre-war frozen dinner than hold a rifle for the Brotherhood. Even with the might of his loyalists, Lyons couldn’t hope to hold the entirety of what he did now. The Pride will die before they even float the idea of turning on him, but I guess it’s all there in the name. The rest though… Could they move on to join the rebels? Or petition Lyons to make concessions? If they could trust Lyons to listen to his people, we wouldn’t be leaving in the first place. 

Deny it as he might, it became all too clear to the paladin what would happen to those that stayed in the Citadel as its endless series of hawkish campaigns against an enemy that showed no signs of cracking took their toll. They’d be short on weaponry- they were already forced to issue conventional rifles to the budding initiates- as well as power armor, the very symbol of what made the Brotherhood the greatest power on the eastern seaboard- the greatest human power, certainly. Lyons wouldn’t change at this point. He’d see the ‘Brotherhood’ he led slaughtered to the last if it meant a local settlement could survive another week. All those that stayed would likely be dead before long, but this rebellion was their chance to avoid such a fate. With trepidation, he grabbed the paint before him, his fear less for the armors he would mark, but grief for those he wouldn’t. 


End file.
